"Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice” could also be called “Movie Director Versus Style, Cohesion, Simplicity, Common Sense, and Believability.”

A chorus of critics and moviegoers have attacked the movie for being a mess. No spoilers herein, but as someone has already written: "there's nothing to spoil."

Here are my thoughts. To the use of the word "mess" you can add: cinematic atrocity, utter catastrophe, bewildering stupidity, and an assortment of whatever negative words and phrases you like.

"Batman v Superman" is brutalist cinema, a mean-spirited pile of shallow, derivative, and cheap-looking distortions. Director Zack Snyder quickly stifles your enthusiasm, as well as your eagerness to be entertained.

The overlong film speaks more to Snyder’s fetishes than to anything else. Sigmund Freud would get an entire book out of Snyder's pathetic neuroses and selfishness. The fragmented film is thematically and visually dark. In fact, it's almost morose. It panders to a place in somebody's soul they shouldn't want made public.

It’s the fetishism that helps send “Batman v Superman” careening into chaos as Snyder links his fetishistic impulses to his call for a New Comic-Book Movie Order. The director wallows in a celebration of Fascism, the dark demand that a person or movement’s authoritarian practices are essential to ridding a society of enemies and holding down the population, usually with fear and mayhem.

Snyder has applied a sense of tone to his effort directly from “The Night Porter,” a feature that celebrates the sexual undercurrent of fascism. In “Batman v Superman,” tight uniforms are a visual reminder of power. Bodies glisten as muscular, shirtless men are hung from a hook and tortured.

Snyder’s Batman is a fascist. He dresses like a monolith; his costuming is rigid, heavy; less blue than that of a hardened black-shirt from another era. Batman’s actions are dangerous and abrupt; his dictates fierce and unrelenting. The character’s single-minded desire is to remove Superman from the equation because the “man of steel” threatens Batman’s governing principles.

The movie has minimally interesting acting from everybody in it. I didn't think Henry Cavill (Clark Kent/Superman) could be any more wooden an actor than he has been. I was wrong. Ben Affleck (Bruce Wayne/Batman) obviously understood the apparent direction to make a sad face every second he's on-screen. Amy Adams as Lois Lane lacks spunk. She says spunky words – "I'm not a woman, I'm a journalist," for example, but the heavy-handed atmosphere of the entire production stifles her energy.

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Shultz loves Donald Trump. Loves him. Know why? Because he has effectively guaranteed another Democratic presidency. Your own reasons for loving him, however, needn’t be so cynical, and I’ll tell you why.

By pushing the rhetoric so far outside the bounds of seriousness, and consequently dominating the media, Donald Trump has forced the other crackpots running for the Republican ticket to more or less abandon any pretense of credibility.

Trump, in other words, has hijacked the right (space, not morals) side of the election. In order to keep up, his competition has had no choice but to prove to the American people that he’s not the only one who can say shockingly stupid things. We can be absurd too! has been the GOP field’s indignant response to Trump’s electoral blitzkrieg.

The best article that I’ve read about the 2016 election was a short piece by Christopher Orr in TheAtlantic, where he used the movie Caddyshack as a (rather profound) analogy for the GOP race.

In Orr’s analogy, the Republican Party is Bushwood (the exclusive country club where the film is set), and Trump is Al Czervik, the obnoxious outsider played by Rodney Dangerfield. Czervik’s personality is not one that the stuffy Bushwood members would normally countenance—he is rude, crude, and disrespectful to the social elite. But he has money, which means he can say and do whatever he wants.

According to Orr, Trump is “basically a real-life Czervik: rich, yes, but an aggressive anti-snob who says whatever the hell he pleases and misses no opportunity to stick it to the establishment.”

Which is why so many genuinely progressive people were – and perhaps still are – excited about Trump’s campaign. The initial hope was that he would eventually jump ship and run as a legitimate third party candidate, taking a good chunk of Republican voters with him and thus breaking up the unholy GOP. This would in turn threaten to subvert the inveterate two-party (or two-factions-of-the-same-party) political structure that makes real change in this country so impossible.

Unfortunately, Trump has assured the Republican National Committee that he will do no such thing. Disappointing, surely; but it doesn’t mean that his campaign is totally worthless.

During the first Republican debate last August, Trump pulled a Czervik, and made some heads in Washington explode, when he explained to the millions of people watching that the American political system is essentially founded on graft.

Hillary Clinton’s debate strategy is pretty straightforward: spit out a bunch of bland, hoary rhetoric that sounds nice but carries no information, refrain from putting her foot in her mouth (that is, refrain from discussing any serious issues in depth), and give the audience a few subtle reminders that she is, in fact, a woman.

If this were a sports competition, we would say that Hillary is “playing not to lose.” Naturally, the mainstream media – including NBC News, which hosted the final Democratic Party debate – is doing what it can to help out. The major outlets have all but ignored Bernie Sanders’ campaign, and while the debates provide him with ample opportunity to advertise his populist talking points, the pro-Clinton bias is plain to see.

Gun control is the sole issue on which it can be said (probably inaccurately) that Hillary is to the left of Sanders. That’s all she’s got—and she’s clinging to it. So, with their partisanship in mind, the executives at NBC News decided that it would be a good idea to kick off the debate with a relatively tough question, aimed at Sanders, about guns. “Right before the debate,” he was told, “you changed your position on immunity from lawsuits for gun manufacturers. Can you tell us why?”

After his explanation, Hillary was asked if she would “like to respond,” which translates to: “Would you like to capitalize on this opportunity to make yourself look progressive and gain the early momentum in this debate?”

Hillary tried her best, and yet, in spite of the fact that the debate was overtly slanted in her favor, she still managed to lose, and lose big. It wasn’t even close. The reader polls conducted by a number of websites reflect this. In Slate’s poll, 86% of participants selected Sanders as the winner. (This of course did not prevent the great political pundits at Slate from trumpeting Hillary as the clear winner. Their headline ran: “Hillary Clinton Won Sunday Night’s Debate.”) A poll run by Time shows the same result: 86% for Sanders. In Politico’s poll, 73% said Sanders. Huffington Post: 72% Sanders. Get the picture?